The ancient gods who became demons: How the Daeva evolved into a force of evil

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In the oldest Zoroastrian texts, the daevas were recognized as genuine gods, albeit ones to be rejected. Over centuries, this status shifted dramatically. These divine beings were transformed into personifications of chaos and malevolence, eventually becoming the demonic hordes that haunt the shadows of later Persian mythology and folklore.

The term daeva shares a common Indo-European root with the Latin deus and the Greek Zeus, originally denoting a divine being. In the Gathas, the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures, the daevas are described as a distinct category of gods that followers were urged to reject. At this stage, they were not yet the demons of later tradition; they were simply gods who were incapable of discerning truth from falsehood. By the time of the Younger Avesta, however, the daevas had been fully daemonized, becoming unambiguously hostile entities associated with darkness and disorder.

The transition from god to demon remains a subject of intense academic debate. Early 20th-century scholars often attributed this shift to a revolutionary reform led by Zoroaster, suggesting he rejected the 'national' gods of pre-Zoroastrian Iran. More recent 'progressive' scholarship rejects this unprovable hypothesis, arguing instead that the daemonization was a gradual process. By the 12th-century Bundahishn, the evil spirit Ahriman is depicted as creating hordes of dews—the Middle Persian evolution of daeva—to counter the creation of the supreme deity, Ahura Mazda. These dews were cast as the antitheses of the Amesha Spentas, the holy immortals who serve as instruments of divine creation.

Medieval Zoroastrian texts offer conflicting interpretations of the dews' nature. Some philosophical works, such as the Denkard, suggest that because existence is the domain of the divine, the dews are non-ontological—present only as a psychological force of destruction. Other texts, like the Book of Arda Wiraz, describe them as terrifyingly real, capable of causing disease, natural disasters, and even mating with humans. Despite this, the tradition maintains a fundamental optimism: the dews are not invincible. Through prayer, the maintenance of hearth fires, and adherence to good thoughts and deeds, the faithful can keep these agents of chaos at bay until the end of time, when they will ultimately vanish.

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